Why minista?
minista is a good fit when you want to use familiar React JSX while publishing or delivering static HTML, CSS, and JavaScript files.
Table of Contents
- Write with familiar tools
- Output for delivery
- Flexible hosting
- Suitable projects
- When to use other services
Write with familiar tools
Write pages and shared elements in JSX and TSX. React components, props, and JavaScript expressions let you build pages without learning another template syntax.
You can use TypeScript completion and type checking, along with automatic code formatting. Choose Markdown or MDX for text-heavy pages and reuse shared parts as React components.
Output for delivery
minista supports both publishing websites and handing over generated HTML and assets.
Adjust file names and output locations, format HTML, CSS, and JavaScript for readability, and package them in a ZIP archive. This also makes minista suitable for updating existing sites or integrating HTML into another system.
See Code formatting for delivery and Delivery archives for configuration examples.
Flexible hosting
Use any environment that can serve static files. In addition to static hosting and CDNs, you can publish to shared hosting by uploading files over FTP.
You do not need to operate a Node.js or minista server after deployment. Site search can also run using search data generated at build time and a browser UI.
Suitable projects
- Corporate websites with multiple pages built from shared components
- Landing pages and service websites delivered as HTML files
- Documentation and blogs with content managed in Markdown and MDX
- Content sites that fetch CMS data at build time
minista is particularly suitable for sites whose content can be determined at build time, or projects that require delivery of static files. If parts of a page need interactive controls, you can combine regular scripts and Islands.
When to use other services
minista specializes in static site generation, so it is not suitable for dynamic server-side processing on every request.
For requirements such as the following, consider another full-stack framework, such as Next.js, or combine minista with external services.
- Dynamic page generation for each request
- If the display depends on login state or data must be processed in real time when a page is accessed, you need SSR or ISR rather than static generation.
- Frequent content updates
- To reflect changes from an admin interface in real time, trigger automatic rebuilds through a headless CMS webhook, or fetch API data in the browser.
- Form submissions and user authentication
- Combine features that require server-side processing with external API services such as Formspree, Supabase, and Firebase, or serverless functions such as Cloudflare Workers.